Sunday, January 27, 2013

Shadow Game

Brother parsed helpings of turkey into plastic yogurt cups as
Uncle washed the dishes. With the roasting pan soaking in the white enamel
sink, he spread the glass tumblers out to dry, their gold-leaf lips pressed
into a folded tea towel. Father herded chairs in from the library, banging his
shins on their struts and muttering curses. Mother lifted the Lazy Susan from
the center of the table, its circling, painted stripes enclosing a dusty
African violet, wax candle pilgrims and cut crystal sugar dish into a diagram
of a minor cosmology. Grandmother rocked by the fire, her steely eyes following
all. When the last of the dishes had been cleared away and the soapstone
woodstove stocked, Grandfather made his exit. In perennial khakis and white
dress shirt, he would pause on the threshold of the glowing porch like Don José
in Velázquez’s great picture, a lone hand held aloft in silent adieu.

A chair squeaked in the kitchen as Brother dealt out two
decks of vinyl cards over the table’s oily grooves. Shadows danced, eyes
squinted to sort cards in the low orb of light cast by the lone hanging lantern.
Scores from the last game were read aloud to nods of appreciation and Grandmother
took the lead in schooling the new initiates in the rules of play. Others
shouted out the nuances.

“Aces high, deuces low, no jokers.”

“Always follow suit!”

“If you can’t follow suit, you can trump.”

“The aim is to take exactly as many tricks as you bid. That
way, you get your bid plus ten.”

“But cards can cancel!”

“Because there are two decks, two aces of spades could be
played in the same hand; the second eliminates the first. In that case, the
next highest card played in the suit led would take the trick.”

“Unless it has been trumped!”

“And that’s why they call it ‘Oh Hell.’”

Father became positively rosy when bidding a hand at Oh
Hell. An off-suit jack-ten combination, a singleton queen: those were pure
gold. Staring at a hand cut in alternating patterns of black and red, he
carefully selected a comment from the slim repertoire of accepted, card-table
wit: “Are you sure these cards were shuffled?” Or: “Who dealt this hand? Thank you!” Then the bidding began. With an
initial ten cards dealt to each player, Uncle would record a sequence of ebbing,
low-ball undulations that built in height with tidal proximity to Father. The
bid’s audacity never lost its effect for being expected. “Four!” he might shout
gleefully. Once the silence of play descended into the rhythmic thrum of vinyl
cards on the wooden table, Father’s plan would quickly unravel. His jack would
be taken by a trump six. That string of low trumps and off-suit face cards on
which he had pinned his hopes would go missing entirely. Ambushed in a palace
coup, his queen would return as a widow with but one trick leaving Father recounting
just how difficult his hand had been—how
that unexpected and perfectly foolish play by Nephew had shattered his
strategy.

Father bred a game of big bidding and bigger talk. Egged on
by Grandmother (who never let her reputed maternal instincts get in the way of
success at cards), he made bold estimates. He took wild gambles and loved the
tell of his losses nearly as much as his rare victories. When he died, and when
Grandmother followed him to the grave fourteen months later, the shape of play
caved in upon itself. Then, the shadow game began.

At first, its presence was nearly imperceptible. For, Brother
and I had long haunted the darker recesses of play, moving unobtrusively
beneath the glaring, spot-lit boasts of the elders. Ours was a topsy-turvy
world of stealth and intrigue where disposal rather than accumulation was the
objective. Twos and threes held sovereign. There, face cards carried all the
taboo danger of a royal body. They were to be flushed out when the play turned
safely off suit or jettisoned into the milky wake of Grandmother’s inevitable
trump leads. Risky nines and even jacks had to be wedged into cross-cut
thickets. Cards were to be cancelled whenever possible. “Zero” was our standard
bid and the horizon of our thoroughly pragmatic calculations. Nonetheless, one
of us often won. “And the meek shall inherit the earth,” Uncle liked to say
with a grimace.

With the chairs now gathered and the cards dealt once more, we
could feel the familiar spaces inside the game changing. Brother cut to Uncle,
Uncle dealt to the grieving couple who had joined us for Thanksgiving dinner,
and the rules of the game recited. Once proud kings and their suited entourages
had opened broad avenues of play as Grandmother’s thrust and Father’s parry entertained
encircled crowds with their ritual violence. Banners hung, gauntlets thrown,
and all eyes turned to the spectacle in that public square, Brother and I could
steal down alleyways, pinching pockets and turning tricks. The lips that had
pursed—those earnest brows that had furrowed over clutched cards—were bent to
build spectacular edifices high on show, sharp in scorn for careless play, but
long with shadows. Without that billowing tent of big-top bidding, ours had become
a low-rise, almost subterranean dwelling. A landscape of single resident occupancy
bed-sits spread now before us populated by bids in digital increments of alternating
ones and zeroes.

Cousin moved into Grandmother’s house after she died. Mother
looked at her meager options in Town after Father’s death. With some repairs
and much-needed insulation installed, she lived on in the adjoining barn house.
But, if the houses could be filled and the buildings repaired, the architecture
of the game had collapsed like a house of cards. What do you do when you can’t
build back up? Instinctively, we built down. Once a furtive act done to
eliminate dross, discarding became an art-form. Irrelevant to official play and
impotent for the game’s acquisitive aims, a six of diamonds played under a
spades lead and clubs trump begot bejeweled responses. We built intricate runs
of syncopating patterns, aligning diamonds in numerical order and its reverse,
all off-suit and immaterial to play. Symmetries abounded; a discarded three
called for another three to be played. As we all now bid zero, ours became an
age of cancelling. Tricks were taken by that lowly lead of a five of spades,
which nonetheless stood alone—after all the cancelling and off-suit matching—as
the only valid card left in play.

It’s not that our shadow game broke the rules of the old
game, exactly. We all still followed suit; we made bids. Some won, some lost.
It was more that the encircling play mandated by those rules had come to render
visible the spiraling vortex that had opened before us and between us. Unmoored
from the chairs that now sat empty and indifferent to the proud aims that had
once filled them, the game showed us that shape of darkness. And we ran through
it, like children chasing fireflies.